Pride and Politics:
A View from the Left
Communist Party of Canada and Queer Pride
1998 has been a year of important victories and ongoing struggles to win full equality and justice for lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgendered persons in Canada. The Pride events being organized across the country are an occasion to celebrate advances in the struggle for social justice, legal equality and democracy, and to reflect on the struggles that now lie ahead. The Communist Party of Canada takes this opportunity to join the celebration of Pride and reaffirm its full commitment to queer liberation.
Long hard years of organizing and mobilization have led to outstanding and crucial victories in the bourgeois legal system. The Supreme Court ruling in Vriend versus Alberta forced the reactionary Klein government to include prohibitions against discrimination based on sexual orientation in the Individual Rights Protection Act in Alberta, while the even more recent ruling of the Ontario Court of Appeals, in CUPE and Rosenberg versus Canada, sets the stage for the extension of pension benefits long denied to same-sex couples.
Reactionary forces like the Reform Party and the Canada Family Action Coalition are now mobilizing to turn back the clock, and to push bourgeois political parties even further to the right. Their homophobic and transphobic agenda is part of a broad attack against working people and the labour movement, one which serves the interests of Big Business and transnational corporations who seek the destruction of democratic rights and the gutting of social programs in their drive for globalization and intensified exploitation.
Homophobia and transphobia -- like racism, sexism, and national chauvinism -- are weapons of hatred used by the ruling classes to divide working people and to hold back struggles against oppression and exploitation. The Communist Party dedicates itself wholeheartedly to fighting homophobia and transphobia in all its manifestations and to the struggle for equality and justice regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity.
The struggle for queer liberation is entering a new stage. The Communist Party of Canada believes that the key to advancing this struggle lies in building a broad People’s Coalition to fight for a genuine People’s Alternative to the neo-conservative political agenda of Big Business and the transnational corporations. Such a movement must be based on unity between labour and the popular movements among youth and students, women, seniors, environmentalists, peace activists, farmers, aboriginal people, immigrants, queers, and many others. With an effective action plan to win mass support, such a coalition can step up the fight outside and inside Parliament for a people’s agenda.
A People’s Alternative should be centred on a policy of full employment and higher wages, but it also must contain sweeping measures to achieve greater social equality in Canadian society, especially for women and seniors, whose gains are increasingly under attack; for young Canadians who bear the brunt of high unemployment; and for people of colour, immigrants, aboriginal peoples, queers, and other targets of the "scape-goating" ideology of the ruling class and the ultra right.
These and many other vital steps will be impossible without curbing the transnationals, stopping privatization and deregulation, protecting the environment, and defending Canadian sovereignty. That means scrapping the Canada U.S. free trade pact, NAFTA and APEC, and blocking the Multilateral Agreement on Investments (MAI). Achieving such a program requires mobilization and solidarity by the organized labour movement and democratic forces. The Communist Party pledges to continue its efforts to help build such a broad and powerful People’s Coalition.
The Communist Party believes that such a struggle can lead towards full social emancipation and genuine people’s power in a future socialist Canada, where our economy will be socially owned and democratically controlled. In such a society, it will finally be possible to eliminate exploitation and oppression, achieve broader equity, defend our sovereignty, and protect our environment.
Links to other relevant sites on the Web
EGALE: Equality for Gays and Lesbians Everywhere
Your comments and suggestions are welcome!
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